With emerging delay sensitive gaming services such as cloud gaming and online gaming, the importance of understanding and reducing the effect of delay on the gamer's Quality of Experience (QoE) becomes highly important for the success of these services. In this paper, the findings of two subjective experiments investigating the relationship between delay and QoE are reported. In the first study, it was shown that in addition to the direct effect of the delay on QoE, there is a significant indirect effect between delay and QoE through the relationship with performance. In the second part of the paper, we illustrate that adapting characteristics of a game can strongly mitigate the negative effect of delay on gaming QoE due to increased player performance. This adaptation in addition to compensation the effect of the delay, in contrast to the other difficulty adjustment systems, does not require to track the gamer's interaction, behaviors, and profile.